Career Change

Land Your Next Job with LinkedIn’s Volunteer Marketplace

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LinkedIn now makes it easier to find volunteer opportunities. Gain access by going to http://volunteer.linkedin.com or by clicking on the “Jobs” menu option, selecting “Advanced Search,” “More Options,” and then entering “volunteer” in the job title. LinkedIn has partnered with some major volunteer matching sites to make this happen. Here’s why this feature is so great. More

How to Find & Use Keywords for Your Job Search

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Keywords in your resume, LinkedIn profile, emails and ‘pitch’ help to communicate your value. To job prospects, your use of the right keywords tells them you are an “insider” (everyone wants to hire insiders) and that you understand the problems they face. Organizations use keyword filters for candidate searches, so your use of strategically placed keywords will improve your likelihood of being spotted.

When someone is searching on LinkedIn for a candidate with your skills (increasingly LinkedIn is the first stop for candidate searches), keywords in certain parts of your profile  matter more than others. More

Top Resume Mistakes to Avoid (Part 2)

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Oops!In Part 1, I covered the top two mistakes that I see clients make on their resumes.  In this post you’ll learn how to avoid six more resume pitfalls.  Topping off this list:

Your resume places too much focus on responsibilities, not enough on accomplishments

Which phrase do you think is more powerful?

  1. Responsible for running monthly financial reports.
  2. Redesigned monthly financial reporting process, cutting production time from one month to five days.More

Top Resume Mistakes to Avoid (Part 1- the top two)

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(Update: Part 2 is here) When a potential employer reviews your resume, s/he thinks: a) Can this person help me to do my job? and b) I have about10-30 seconds to scan this resume. Hence, the Golden Rule of resume writing: Your “how I can help you” message needs to jump off the page in the 10-30 seconds it’s being reviewed. You’ll hear many rules (like this one) tossed around by experts. My suggestion from experience and training is to forget all those other rules, and just follow this one rule.  Anything that serves this Golden Rule is good, anything that doesn’t is bad– which brings us to the top two resume mistakes:More

Get better LinkedIn people-search results with “Boolean Logic”

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LinkedIn’s “Advanced People Search” feature is a fantastic tool for finding people in your extended network or shared groups who can help you to reach your career goals.  As I discuss in my book Your Social Media Job Search, including boolean logic in your search terms such as AND, OR, NOT, parenthesis and quotes around phrases can greatly expand its power.  To demonstrate, here’s an example of a client who was interested in obtaining a marketing manager or director position at Pfizer.  More

10 Ways to Take Control of Your Job Search

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businesswoman flying take control shutterstock_195916973It can be tempting to attribute a long job search to factors beyond your control. The factors that I hear jobseekers mention include age, experience (i.e. over- or under-qualified), resume gaps, weight, ethnic background, gender, or some other physical feature. While, at times, these factors and biases do cause problems for job-seekers, nine times out of ten I see that the problem is actually in their job-search strategy or execution.

So, here’s a checklist of 10 questions to ask yourself first, before attributing a long search to factors beyond your control. Your answers will help to put you back in the driver’s seat and on the road to the job you want.More

Employment Data Shows Pockets of Opportunity

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The latest BLS report showed the unemployment rate stuck at a dismal 9.1%. BUT, more positive news for many jobseekers can be found within the data. In particular, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelors degree or higher remained much lower than the overall rate, at 4.3%, More

Employment Trends: Health Care Hot, Real Estate Not

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Indeed.com, an online job-search engine that aggregates job postings from across the web, released an analysis of employment trends by industry and geography.  Their findings could be helpful to those of you who are looking to develop job targets– I recommend checking it out.  My observations from their data:

  • The health care sector shows the largest opportunity by far, with a total of 813,000 job-postings, followed by Retail More

Using LinkedIn for Job-target Research

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Many (or most) of you are probably on LinkedIn to some extent (if you’re not you should be– www.linkedin.com).  LinkedIn is an awesome tool for getting results in your job search.  But are you really getting the value out of it that you could be?  Use LinkedIn to advance your search in three ways: More

Initial take on LinkedIn’s new “Career Explorer” beta

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In LinkedIn’s blog and a recent Wall Street Journal article, a new LinkedIn capability was described. Career Explorer is designed to help college students use LinkedIn’s network to make career decisions; it’s now being tested in 60 schools.More

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